When Matt Palazzolo passed away suddenly at the age of 33 in January 2018, it seemed as though the third season of his web series “Bloomers” may have gone with him. However, seven years later, his friends and collaborators are paying tribute to his memory by finishing and releasing Season 3 — aka, the Lost Season.
“I quit my day job and made it my mission to finish the series in Matt’s honor,” Evan Monheit shared. “I didn’t realize it at that moment, but over the course of making the show, I was able to finally grieve for Matt and find some sort of closure. I had never gotten to say goodbye to him — he was gone so fast — and now I had an opportunity to spend all this time with him. I’ve spent the last 1.5 years serving as the entire post team (editor, composer, mixer, colorist, everything) to bring it to completion as faithfully as possible.”
While Season 3 had already been written and filmed when Palazzolo died from heat stroke while hiking in Australia, it had not been edited. It stayed that way until Monheit realized finishing the project could prove beneficial to everyone involved — including EP and star Fernanda Espindola and even Palazzolo’s father.
“There was a moment in my life in 2023 where I was just sort of feeling creatively stuck. When Matt had passed, they had made an effort to get it done, but it was a little bit overwhelming for somebody to come in and take it,” Monheit told TheWrap. “They had actually filmed about 99.9% of it, so it was all sort of ready in footage form, it was files on a hard drive and organized really nicely. They just hadn’t kind of gotten there.”
“A friend of mine had taken me to lunch and was sort of asking me, you know, ‘What do you need? What do you want?’ And I was like, ‘I think I just need to get a new challenge. I need to change something in my life.’ He helped me sort of remember that, ‘Oh, what about your friend’s show ‘Bloomers?’” he continued. “It had been really painful for me and his passing was very quick, so I didn’t know if I could do that. But I called up Fernanda and she gave me the hard drives. I opened up the first scene and it was a beautifully cinematic frame of Matt and I just sort knew at that moment, I need to do this; this is not as scary as I thought it was going to be.”
“Confronting his images, we just didn’t get a chance to say goodbye and there’s a lot of pain around that, but it just really spoke to me,” Monheit added. “His character Brooke was particularly challenging to edit, because his arc is that he is unhappy living in Los Angeles and he wants to leave. And those scenes were very tough for me because he just was very unhappy. I found those to be very meaningful, because he wanted to have a different life and he felt underutilized — not that he wasn’t appreciated, just that he had a skill set and wanted more for himself. I was feeling that way, too, which is why I wanted to do this, so there’s certainly some heavy, heavy symbolism there.”
“Bloomers” began in 2011 as a passion project for Palazzolo and his peers in Los Angeles, as Espindola recalled: “Matt and I met in acting class in 2009. Honestly, one day we were working on a scene together and we were discussing some of our frustrations with our careers. This was 2010, 2011, right when web series were having a big surge. And jokingly, we were like, we should just make our own thing, show the industry how to cast us and not just be stereotyped into our ethnicities.”
“I had no idea Matt was a writer, and a brilliant writer at that. A couple of weeks later, he was like, ‘Hey, I wrote something. Do you want to come over and read it with me?’ So we sat at his kitchen table and we read the episodes — he read all the male roles, I read all the female roles,” she added. “We were laughing throughout the six episodes and at the end he was like, ‘Hey, you want to produce this with me?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’”
Meanwhile, Monheit shared how he first got involved with the show: “Matt was one of my closest friends. I met him in 2004, 2005, and he had told me that he was doing his own show, sort of to promote himself and his friends and be their own vehicle. At the time, I was kind of working as a composer and trying to put myself out there — and there was no money, it was all self-funded and everything — but let me just get my foot in the door, so I composed the music for the first two seasons.”
It’s now been 10 years since Season 2 first aired, but Monheit and Espindola think their late friend would actually find the beauty in that irony.
“Matt was a lover of absurdist comedy and things that just felt awkward and weird and symbolic, in a way,” Monheit said. “I think he would probably be laughing and loving the fact that this is kind of on the mark — you know, ‘late bloomers’ and the show now took 10 years to finish. I think he would appreciate the symbolism in that.”
“The title ‘Bloomers’ came from a double meaning: they work in an underwear factory, so bloomers from old times; but also that these characters were trying to grow up. I think that played itself so nicely,” Espindola agreed. “It’s ironic, but we had many starts and stops in post-production until Evan came along and was heaven-sent. I think Matt would appreciate that this was the right team to get it finished. All the starts and stops were simply because they were not meant to be, we were supposed to finish this together for him. So I think he’s kind of chuckling wherever he is going, ‘Look what I did for you guys.’”
So now that Season 3 is underway on YouTube, could there ever be a fourth season at some point in the future?
“We wrap Season 3 in a way that kind of wraps it as a series, but also left it open to continuing, because we knew that quite a few of us were getting busy with our careers and wouldn’t be able to keep coming back to do this. So we wanted to give the audience a good feeling at the end, but it’s really hard to think about that without Matt,” Espindola explained. “Is there a story to tell for these characters? Sure. Would we want to do it without Matt? That’s a whole emotional part that I don’t think we discussed or even think about. It’s a scary thought … It would be a tricky thing to do, though not impossible. We would come in with a lot of care, the same love and care we put into finishing this season for Matt.”
But ultimately, Monheit is just happy to have been able to spend some more time with his late friend: “What they were able to accomplish with Season 3 was extraordinary for having almost no budget and resources. I saw pretty quickly that I needed to do it and I needed to heal, I think, too. So it was really important and a special gift for me.”
“Bloomers” Season 3 is currently airing new episodes every Wednesday on Youtube.
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